Quotes About Totalitarianism

The great lie of democracy, its essential paradox, is that democracy is first to be sacrificed when its security is at risk. Every state is totalitarian at heart; there are no ends to the cruelty it will go to to protect itself.

All the crushing might of an armed state is hurled against any man who refuses to accept the New Faith. At the same time, Stalinism attacks him from within, saying his opposition is caused by his "class consciousness", just as psychoanalysts accuse their foes of wanting to preserve their complexes.

Democracy's a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it's no longer democracy, is it? It's something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism.

Vietnam was a terrible mistake for the United States. But like Iraq, Vietnam was a badly chosen battlefield in a larger conflict with totalitarianism that America had no choice but to pursue.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

In general, literature is a natural adversary of totalitarianism. Tyrannical governments all view literature in the same way: as their enemy. I lived for a long time in a totalitarian state, and I know firsthand that horror.

My view on Islam is that it is not so much a religion as a totalitarian political ideology with religious elements.

The program Hitler outlined rejected everything: it was anticapitalistic and antiproletarian, revolutionary and restorational; it conjured up its dire visions of the future along with nostalgic pictures of the good old days.

He] saw communism for the sham that it was--a bunch of brutes who seized power in the name of the people, only to repress the very people they claimed to champion.

It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.

The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient: I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive, which is why, perhaps, all totalitarian theories of the State, from Plato's downwards, have deeply mistrusted the arts. They notice and say too much, and the neighbors start talking.

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

Where the sole employer is the state, [opposition] means death by slow starvation.

What's shocking is not His monstrous features—plenty of gods are monstrous, it seems almost to have been a prerequisite—but that there's no recourse from Him. No power beyond His. The most monstrous feature of God, my friends, is the totalitarianism. This vengeful, seething God, this punishment-ordaining bastard, is ultimate! Mind if I have a Pepsi?

Hitler Almanyas?'nda özel bir tutum yayg?nd?: Bilen konuÅŸmuyor, bilmeyen sormuyor ve soru sorana yan?t verilmiyordu.

S? distrugi omul e greu, aproape tot atât de greu cât s?-l creezi: n-a fost uÅŸor, n-a durat puÅ£in, dar voi, hitleriÅŸtii, aÅ£i reuÅŸit s-o faceÅ£i. Iat?-ne docili sub privirile voastre: din partea noastr? nu mai aveÅ£i de ce v? teme, nu vor mai fi acte de revolt?, nici cuvinte de sfidare ÅŸi nici m?car o privire de condamnare.

Arinwald's favorite film has become the version of 1984 starring John Hurt and Richard Burton; the moment that most satisfies in that production is when Burton says to Hurt, "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.

no one here ever took the work of Karl Marx or Friedrich Nietzsche or Sigmund Freud seriously. So there had been no Lenin, no Soviet Union, no communism or fascism; and two hundred million people who, elsewhere, had been killed by those regimes, had not been killed here.

to preserve freedom and stave off a cruel totalitarian future, respect for truth must be restored.

Sometimes, however, common sense required paranoia. It seemed that the political elites were striving, with admiration for George Orwell and rare unanimity, to ensure that the totalitarian state in the novel 1984 would be realized no later than fifty years after the author predicted. In

It seemed that the political elites were striving, with admiration for George Orwell and rare unanimity, to ensure that the totalitarian state in the novel 1984 would be realized no later than fifty years after the author predicted.

Nazis and communists have a lot in common,' Alex said. 'They want the same thing – absolute control, unqualified power.

Sodom resembled twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, where state employees were stationed in apartment buildings to monitor everyone who entered the building, a level of oppression those fortunate to live in free societies have difficulty fathoming.

Iqbal not only conceived of a self-governing Muslim state, his passionate voice awakened and activated Indian Muslims, motivating them not only to strive to free themselves from the bondage of imperialism and colonialism, but also to challenge other forms of totalitarian control. Believing fervently in human equality and the right of human beings to dignity, justice and freedom, Iqbal empowered the dis-empowered to stand up and be counted.